The August 1 issue of The New Yorker has a review of the Michael Winterbottom film 9 Songs containing this quote:
There is a fine film to be made about the retreat from worldly obligation into erotic rite, and Brando and Bertolucci made it in 1972. But what ‘Last Tango in Paris’ proved was that our skin-grazing view of a body makes us more, not less, enthusiastic to grasp the shape of the soul that it enshrines. Sex, in other words, is a surprising revelation of character, and when the characters in question, like those in ‘9 Songs,’ are drab to the point of inane, their lovemaking becomes as heated and gripping as blancmange.
Now, setting aside the fact that this is hilarious (and I had to look up the recipe for blancmange), I doubt very much that the director of the film was trying to make any large statements about the nature of the human soul. I hadn’t read anything about the movie when I saw it, and while it was surprising in many ways, my primary response was disbelief that it passed the censors uncut with an 18 certificate.
This movie, friends, is the first mainstream manifestation of the tenets of what might be described as alternative-feminist porn. My eyebrows were raised less by what happened on-screen (multiple scenes of real explicit consensual sex and a female lead allowed to enjoy herself without negative narrative consequences) than by the fact that anyone can rent the movie from the indie shelf of their local videostore.
Whereas one of the main criticisms of the film in other publications is that it is not porn, because the action is kind of boring. Which makes me wonder: have these writers watched any porn lately? I think not.
Maybe there was some kind of artistic statement underlying the whole scheme (Winterbottom originally wanted to make a film of the Houellebecq novel Platform which might be interpreted to contain philosophy of … some kind). But in practice, the movie basically shows an extremely normal no-hope relationship based around physical contact and rock shows.
One hopes that this is how many people conduct their lives in their teens and twenties. One knows that the average mid-30’s scientist is more likely to be worried about marriage and mortgages (though I can attest that the British Antarctic survey folks tend to be marginally hotter than other flavors of scientist – they’re the extreme sports-people of the research community). But fundamentally, there is no plot and no attempt to make a grand statement. Except, perhaps, for the whole thing about screening real sex at Cannes.
The seriously depressing thing about this movie followed the UK release. The established (former child star) mid-30’s male actor, Kieran O’Brien, rightfully proclaimed It wasn’t difficult for me to make and I’m really proud of it…. I was quite prepared to talk to anybody anywhere about how proud I was to work on the film and how good it was… I was always the opposite of ashamed.
The young female actor, Margot Stilley, said It isn’t shocking… If you know you are going to watch a film like this, it’s not abrasive. It’s normal sex that everyone has, not crazy stuff.
Of course, it was Margot Stilley who was pursued by tabloids, watched her family being harassed by the press, and eventually asked that her name be withdrawn from the promotion of the film.
Now that the movie is being screened in the states I presume that there will be even more backlash. C’mon, people. Double standards are so tacky.